Achieving more from clients' property holdings — making office and residential relocations easy and stress-free, and the estate behind them work harder.
Four quick questions and we'll set out how we would handle the move — then send the brief to our team on WhatsApp.
We provide asset planning and strategic estate expertise to clients who are looking for more from their property holdings. We offer innovative, practical solutions that can help drive property efficiency savings, enhance business performance or frontline service delivery, as well as the funding of new capital projects.
Driving property efficiency savings — releasing cost and space that the organisation is carrying without benefit.
Enhancing business performance, or frontline service delivery where the estate exists to serve the public.
Using the estate to help fund new capital projects, rather than treating disposal receipts as a windfall.
Our team operates right across the country, working with clients in the private and public sectors — with specialist experience in three sectors where the estate is central to the mission.
Fraser Bond's market-leading Planning, Development and Regeneration division integrates estate and asset management experts working alongside development surveyors, financial consultants, economists and regeneration specialists.
Consent and policy around estate change.
Explore →Appraisals and deliverability for surplus sites.
Explore →Acquiring authorities and affected parties.
Explore →Place-scale change around the estate.
Explore →Creating thriving economies around the assets.
Explore →Funding routes and value-for-money assessment.
Explore →Almost every relocation that goes wrong went wrong at the start, by planning forwards from when the search began instead of backwards from the date the old lease ends.
Work it the other way. Fix the date you must have vacated. Count back the dilapidations works and the time to agree the schedule. Count back the fit-out, which for a conventional office fit-out is commonly twelve to twenty weeks on site depending on scope, services and whether landlord consent is needed. Count back the licence to alter, the legals on the new lease at six to ten weeks, and the search and negotiation before that. What you have left is how long you actually have — and it is usually less than people assume by a quarter.
The useful output of that arithmetic is not a Gantt chart. It is knowing which single item is on the critical path, because that is the only item worth spending money to accelerate.
Relocation budgets are built around the new building. The overruns are nearly always in the old one.
A full repairing and insuring lease with no schedule of condition annexed at the start leaves you arguing about the condition of a building as it was years before you can evidence it. Reinstatement of alterations you inherited, or that a predecessor made without a licence, can land on you. Damages for breach of a repairing covenant at termination are capped by section 18(1) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 at the diminution in the value of the landlord’s reversion, which is a genuine protection and also a valuation argument you need evidence to run. Dilapidations claims follow a pre-action protocol, and a claim met with a properly evidenced response behaves very differently from one met with an apology.
Two practical consequences. Start the dilapidations position at least twelve months before you leave, not at the end. And price double-running — the period when you hold two buildings and one set of staff — explicitly, because it is real money and it is the first thing a tight programme consumes.
A relocation is one of the few decisions a business makes that changes every employee’s day. A move that is correct on cost and wrong on commute has a cost; it just appears in recruitment and attrition rather than in the property line.
Postcode-level travel time for the actual staff list, not an average. One building can be twelve minutes better for two-thirds of people and far worse for a specific team.
Desk ratio follows the attendance policy. A space planned for a pattern the business has not committed to is the most common cause of a fit-out that is wrong within a year.
Uncertainty costs more goodwill than bad news. A clear date and a clear reason, early, is worth more than a polished announcement later.
One owner, one issues list, one weekly meeting. Relocations fail in the gaps between workstreams far more often than inside any one of them.
For a conventional requirement, plan on nine to fifteen months from brief to occupation. Search and negotiation four to six months, legals six to ten weeks running partly in parallel, fit-out commonly twelve to twenty weeks on site, plus the exit works on the old building. Below about 5,000 sq ft with a fitted space it can be materially quicker; a landlord works package or a licence to alter extends the middle.
Three things, in order: the comms and connectivity lead time, the dilapidations liability on the building you are leaving, and the period of double-running when you are paying for both. The first is a programme risk, the second two are budget risks, and none of them is visible in the rent.
It depends on term and on how specific your requirements are. Fitted or managed space removes capital cost, programme risk and reinstatement liability, and costs more per square foot. A bespoke fit-out is cheaper over a long term and only pays back if you stay long enough to amortise it. We will model both on your actual term rather than recommend by default.
Either we do, through project management, or we work alongside a project manager you appoint. What matters is that the client duties under the CDM Regulations 2015 are discharged by someone who knows they hold them, because those duties sit with the organisation commissioning the work.
Yes, for the property and programme side: location appraisal, acquisition, fit-out and occupation. We are not immigration or tax advisers and will not pretend otherwise; where those matter we will say so and work alongside whoever you appoint.
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